Bowie Marketplace renovation progressing

John McNamara, Staff

The construction of the new Bowie Marketplace shopping center is progressing on schedule, according to officials with developer Berman Enterprises. If things continue to move ahead according to plan, the shopping center will open sometime this fall.

The construction of the new Bowie Marketplace shopping center is progressing on schedule, according to officials with developer Berman Enterprises. If things continue to move ahead according to plan, the shopping center will open sometime this fall. (John McNamara, Staff)

If all goes according to plan, Bowie residents will be buying their groceries, eating out or getting their nails done at the renovated Bowie Marketplace shopping center in the fall.

An expedited permitting process and the mild winter weather have accelerated work on replacing the old retail eyesore.

Progress is becoming more and more apparent to those driving by the site on Route 450. Much of the parking lot has been re-paved and the skeletal beginnings of the new retail space are already in place.

"We feel very excited about where things are," said Brian Berman of Berman Enterprises, the Rockville-based development firm that owns the property and is building the new retail space. "We're hoping we can meet our April-May deadline to hand over space to our retail partners.

"We're doing great. The contractors are doing a really nice job."

High-end grocer Harris Teeter will be the marquee tenant. The Bowie store will be just the second in Prince George's County. The other Harris Teeter location is in Laurel. The company operates 11 other stores in the state, many in upscale metro area locations like Potomac, Rockville, Germantown, Olney and Columbia.

By John McNamara / Baltimore Sun Media Group

By John McNamara / Baltimore Sun Media Group

Berman also touted the other offerings at the new Bowie Marketplace. The shopping center has room for 25 retail tenants. Berman estimated that his family's company has signed deals with about 15 businesses that will occupy space in the new shopping area.

According to figures on the website of KLNB, a metro area company that provides commercial real estate services, the Bowie Marketplace site has almost 50,000 residents within a 3-mile radius, and their average household income is more than $105,000.

The residential component of the development project is also beginning to take shape — although it's still in the planning stage.

Plans for the site included 200-300 apartments, 20 percent of which were to be set aside for seniors. The zoning obstacles to that part of the project — the site had long been zoned solely for commercial use — were removed in the fall by a text amendment to the code passed by the County Council.

Berman said he expects to break ground on the apartments in about 12 months and they should be ready for tenants in 2018.

"We're in the initial phases of looking at building shapes," he said. "It's still early on the residential side."

He said the housing he envisions would be comparable to the units at Harmony Place, a Berman-owned complex near the Bowie Town Center.

City officials had long sought a buyer-developer to rehabilitate the Marketplace site. The once-thriving retail center kept losing tenants, lost its anchor store — a Safeway — and had become something of a black eye on Route 450, billed as Bowie's "main street."

In city documents, the shopping center had been described as "a dying retail property" and "in an ongoing state of visual and structural decay."

Local officials made repeated unsuccessful attempts to lure a big-name grocer to the city in order to provide an anchor store that might help jump-start redevelopment.

Finally, in an effort to spur re-development, city officials approved a $975,000 incentive package to Berman Enterprises, which owned the site. Berman, in turn, agreed to develop a new grocery-anchored retail center there.

It was Berman Enterprises, rather than the city or the county, that negotiated the deal with Harris Teeter.

For Bowie Mayor G. Frederick Robinson, the money spent on incentives was well worth it.

"Sometimes, before we can be successful in cultivating new business and development, we need to be a catalyst for development," he said last spring.